The blues is an American art form and the most important musical form in jazz. Although there are other formal paradigms of the blues, such as 8-bar or 16-bar, this course focuses on different incarnations of the 12-bar blues. There are considerable differences between Early Jazz blues, Swing blues, Bebop blues, Modal blues, and Post Bop blues. Each type has its unique harmonic syntax, melodic vocabulary and, associated with them, improvisational techniques. While other aspects of jazz performance practice have been constantly changing from one stylistic convention to another, the blues has never lost its identity and expressive power, and continues to exert a powerful influence on the harmonic and melodic syntax of jazz.
This seven-week course explores important aspects of the blues, blues improvisation, basic keyboard textures, jazz harmonic and melodic syntax. Topics include: (1) Blues Progressions; (2) Blues and Other Scales; (3) Improvisational Tools, and others. This course will also cover valuable theoretical concepts enabling the student to master the art of jazz improvisation. Each topic will be introduced from a practical perspective with the clearly stated goal: to improve one’s improvisational skills. Jazz improvisation is rooted in spontaneity, creativity, self-expression and, at the same time, self-control and order. A unique pedagogical approach based on a one-to-one musical interaction conducted with different instrumentalists will help to reinforce many of the concepts introduced in this course and realize its stated objectives.

Lesson 6 centers around the demonstration of improvisational techniques discussed thus far, including motivic development, guide-tone lines, and chordal arpeggiation. Observation of live Eastman musicians, as well as play-along tracks provided by the rhythm section, allow the student to imitate, assimilate, and apply the techniques discussed in the course.

教學方

Dariusz Terefenko

Associate Professor of Jazz Studies and Contemporary Media

腳本

We can now demonstrate the use of 5-Part Chords, using the blues for honest chord progression and I asked Charlie to play with us using the same chord changes that we've been working on. One, two, and one, two, three, four. [MUSIC] Very nice, so, as we've discussed earlier, five-part chords give us very idiomatic harmonic vocabulary. And you could hear Charlie basically spelling out the underlying harmonies. Going up to the ninth, playing groupless harmonies, they're far more idiomatic. Now tell us shortly about your practice with them, you frequently spell five-part chords without the root, is this part of your routine or something that you've maybe don't do as often? >> Yeah, I don't do it probably as much as I should, but it's something that I have worked on. And I think is very idiomatic to especially the bebop era, where you leave the bass note alone, because the bass player's playing it. And you really get into the area of extensions using the 9s and the 11s and 13s, the really colorful notes. So it's a very good way to get to those notes and I really like using those in my improvisation. >> Absolutely. And what Charlie did in his solo, which was particularly effective, he used that framework of these upper rootless five-part chords, but would begin to kind of fill them in with some passing motion. But still kind of reducing his lines to four-part structures, you would get clear statement of five-part chords. Now just to demonstrate how effective straightforward arpeggiations can be, take for instance, the first four bars. Can we just play, and I'm just going to spell out rootless five-part chords. Minor chords will go up, the dominant chord will go down. And let's do it, one, two, a one, two, three, four. [MUSIC] You see, I mean simple idea, just arpeggiating up and down. So when you listen to the great players from the bebop period, you're going to hear these type of phrases all over and as we discussed earlier, you can take this simple ideas and start playing around with the order in which these notes occur. Instead of going up, we can go down. Instead of going up using the consecutive notes, [MUSIC] You can start using different order between your notes. It's not particularly idiomatic for the trumpet, but Charlie did a wonderful job demonstrating these techniques.